That's a lot of apps and lots of downloads. And lots of money to
be made.

While the opportunity seems obvious, dig a little deeper and
you'll find the competition is fierce. Only about 2 percent of
the top 250 publishers in Apple's iPhone App Store are newcomers, and they only collect about
0.25 percent of the total revenue from those top apps.

It's issues like these, among others, that has Marco Arment
frustrated and upset. The tech entrepreneur and founding lead
developer for Tumblr has written a post examining what's wrong with Apple's App Store.

Lazy reliance on most-downloaded apps: The
App store is designed around a "top lists" feature which, as you
might guess, highlights the most downloaded apps in the store.
Arment argues, like others have before, that the number of
downloads does not reflect an app's success. People download apps
all the time and then never or barely ever use them.

"The dominance and prominence of 'top lists' stratifies the top
0.02% so far above everyone else that the entire ecosystem is
encouraged to design for a theoretical top-list placement that,
by definition, won’t happen to 99.98% of them," he wrote.

Things like quality, sustainability, and updates are almost
irrelevant to App Store success. Arment says. Apple's reliance on
top lists is "lazy."

A decline in indie app developers and quality
apps: Citing other recent articles making the same
point, Arment argues that there is so much "relentless and often
shameless" competition among software developers, many smaller
firms are either scaling back or shutting down altogether. The
ones that stay in business are focusing on developing apps that
do one simple thing well instead of designing big, complicated
and lavish apps. Many, he says, aren't developing quality apps at
all.

"Standing out [in the App Store] requires more effort than ever,
yet profits are harder to come by than ever," Arment wrote.

Poor economics: Since it's harder than ever to
break into the App Store and make a splash, the ROI on app
development is low. Because of this, app creators are doing more
with fewer resources, or sometimes doing less with less.

"Efficiency is key," Arment wrote. "And efficiency means doing
more (or all) of the work yourself, writing a lot less custom
code and UI, dropping support for older OSes, and providing less
customer support."

The bright side: As app developers strive for
said efficiency, Apple OS updates aim to simplify the
process.

"iOS 7’s redesign gave indie developers a huge advantage by
making the stock UI cool again." Arment wrote. "iOS 8 helps even
more. Extensions open up vast new markets and give our apps a lot
more functionality for very little effort."

So, is Apple's App Store broken? Arment thinks so. But he also
thinks "it’s possible to adapt and keep going."